The Lost Crown: A Ghost-Hunting Adventure is a British graphic adventure video game released in 2008. The Lost Crown is the third full title to be written and developed by Jonathan Boakes, author of the Dark Fall games. The screenplay follows the adventure of Nigel Danvers, as he experiences the paranormal in his quest to find the fabled Lost Crown of Anglia.

The game is vividly set in the fictional harbor town of Saxton in The Fens of eastern England, The Lost Crown follows the adventures of two young ghost-hunters, Nigel Danvers and Lucy Reubans. Nigel has fled London, after the theft of several documents from his employer, The Hadden Corporation. The documents contain proof of Hadden’s involvement in experiments with paranormal forces, and the existence of ‘chasm ghosts’. Two Hadden agents, Mr. Hare and Mr. Crow, are dispatched to capture Danvers and return the stolen documents.

Nigel takes refuge in Saxton, where he meets local psychology student Lucy Reubans. Together they set out to solve local mysteries, study paranormal activity and discover the whereabouts of a legendary Anglo-Saxon crown, thought to be buried somewhere around town. Nigel’s presence in the town does not go unnoticed and there are many threats to his life...not just from the living but from the dead also!

Two more Crown-hunting games, The Last Crown and The First Crown, have been adrift in in Development Hell for some time, while an additional haunting-investigation, Blackenrock, is currently slated for a May 2015 release.

Provides Examples of:

Agent Scully: Lucy has shades of this initially, although she's willing to concede that something weird is going on.

Ambiguous Time Period: Nigel never does get a straight answer when he asks what year is it in Saxton, a region filled with anachronisms due to its numerous hauntings.

Ancient Tomb: The hiding place of the Crown is one of these. Nathaniel Ager's crypt is a not-quite-so-ancient version.

Artifactof Doom: The Lost Crown appears to be one by the way everyone including the spirits react to Nigel looking for it.

Being Watched: Between Nigel's own suspicions, soft sounds in the woods, and surveillance photos from the Nightmare Room, it's implied that someone or something is always stalking him. Plus, Mr. Hadden is apparently observing his every move... somehow.

Camera Abuse: When Nigel uses the night-vision camera to explore the catacombs beneath Ulcombe Church, poltergeist activity tosses pebbles at his camera, as if trying to break the lens and strand him in the dark.

The lighthouse on the restaurant's sign is exactly the same image as from the cover of Light's Out, just flipped left-to-right. The primitive hut pictured on the price tag for Rhys's bundles of long sticks is one of the huts from that game's prehistoric fens. There's a copy of the lighthouse-lantern model from the top floor of the 21st-century lighthouse/museum in the entrance to Professor Oogle's museum, and a copy of a figurine from that game in the Old Net Hut.

Two of the books in Celtic Corner were written by Andrew Verney, who appears as a ghost in Dark Fall 1 & 3, and were published in Dowerton where those games were set.

A copy of The Ballad Of Tom Oliver is framed on the wall of The Bear, and a gravestone with that name is in one of the churchyards. Tom's ghost haunts the cellar in Dark Fall: The Journal.

The scissors that keep turning up in Nigel's bedroom are from Dark Fall 1 & 3.

At one point, the phone in Harbour Cottage plays a sound-clip from one of the Dark Fall games, too.

Fetch Quest: Several short ones, including soup ingredients for the Karswells and stone hands and coat-of-arms photos for one of the ghosts.

First-Person Ghost: While most of the game isn't first person, the scenes where objects must be handled or combined only show those objects floating into place, with no sign of Nigel's hands. Granted, that kind of fits the general spookiness of the scenario.

Flies Equals Evil: A swarm of Ager-conjured flies appear to attack Nigel in the Nightmare Room.

For Doom the Bell Tolls: The Saxton Bell is used to enhance the creepiness, as well as mark transitions between phases of the game.

Foreshadowing: One early encounter with Alex Spitmoor takes place next to the phone booth. He's standing in front of the "Reubans Fayre" poster Lucy put up, which hints at his true identity: Detective Alex Reubans, Lucy's brother.

Meta example: in the Steam version, the achievement icon for "A Warning to the Curious" (exhausting all of Nigel's conversation options during his encounter with Hardacre on the first night) is a scythe. On Night 4 at Harbour Cottage, Nigel uses the crystal ball to determine who stole the crown from his bedroom, and sees Hardacre killed by someone wielding a scythe.

Game-Breaking Bug: Clicking the walkie-talkie at the wrong time can leave you stuck inside the Nightmare Room with no way to get the key. In-universe, Nanny Noah's "treasure hunt" would be impossible to complete on May Day because one of the clues is in the Museum, which is closed, although Nigel finishes it on a different day.

Mission Control: Whomever is monitoring the remote cameras in Harbour Cottage. Lucy temporarily takes on this role over a short distance when she directs Nigel around a pitch-black room using the night-vision camera.

Monster Shaped Mountain: Saxton folklore holds that the jagged rocks along the shoreline are spines on the back of Grindle, a dragon from local legend.

Our Ghosts Are Different: Seems like every variant Boakes could think of makes an appearance, from disembodied voices to wraiths of the still-living to full-body corporeal presences that don't know they're dead.

Also several to M. R. James and his A Warning To The Curious. A big one is a skeleton found in the woods which you can identify as a victim of the Ager brothers. Doctor Black is a character from the television adaptation of that story.

The phone in Harbour Cottage plays an eerie recitation of Walter de la Mare's poem "The Listeners" at night.

Shown Their Work: Boakes joined some actual ghost-hunting expeditions to research their methods, and their techniques inspired several of Nigel's spook-detecting Hadden devices.

Spooky Painting: The Agers' group portrait from the Nightmare Room, and Thomas Ager's from Northfield Church. The "Tree of Crows" is haunted also, but less menacingly-so.

Spooky Photographs: Nigel uses a digital and video camera to sniff out clues in the game. Seeing the whole world in gray-scale or night-sight green sometimes really makes it more creepy to see said ghostly images.

Some ghosts or spooky images are clues, some are down right freaktastic, while others are just bizarre and don't have much to do with the game play.

Stupidity Is the Only Option: After you find the crown, you have the problem of finding a safe place to keep it. What you're supposed to do is put it in the trunk in Nigel's bedroom. This leads to a man breaking in, stealing the crown, and dying for his troubles. The thing is, at that point in the game you know there's a safe in the basement and what the combination is. It's only after the crown's stolen from you that Nigel figures to put it in the safe instead.

Rationalized away in the revised edition of the game released on Steam, as Nigel can't bear to go down to the basement because it smells really, really foul down there.

Super Smoke: The Agers manifest both as glowering human figures and as columns of malignant black vapors.

Swirly Energy Thingy: A supernatural version appears in the photos Nigel stole. Also in Ganwulf's tomb.

Unnaturally Blue Lighting: Not exactly blue but the whole game is in gray coloring with only a few objects (flowers, certain animals, train, some objects, some buildings) having splashes of color like blue, green, yellow, or brown. In Night-Vision mode everything is green which makes it irritating to the players eyes after a while.

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